Future plans for Photo.net

[chris hughes]

<i>Far from a "lack of interface design", it seems to me that a lot of thought went into it.

Absence of chrome doesn't mean absence of design. Threads just encourage flaming and

RSI; emoticons are useful only to mark poorly-written messages; animated emoticons and

avatars are a pain in the neck for people with only one processor; editing of already-

posted messages is often abused by trolls. And I would like to reserve a special kick in the

pants to those "interface designers" who set up tables and specify fonts by pixel so they

don't work on high-res screens; a special double kick for the ones who forget that Mac

fonts are 30% smaller. A certain other photographic site comes to mind.<br><br>

Please keep the forum software as it is. It has a bug or two but is not fundamentally

broken.</i>

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You just made a raft of completely unsupported assumptions about my comments and

essentially showed yourself to be ignorant of what comprises design. Did I say I thought

that the site needed a "chrome" interface? No. Did I say that the forum needed emoticons?

No. Did I say that the layouts and fonts needed to be locked down to the pixel? No.

 

Here's a news flash: there's a hell of a lot more to good interface design than the graphics

and layout you use. Good interface design addresses issues such as this one: When you're

in the process of rating photos at PN you can easily click yourself out of the "rate recent"

function and find yourself in a dead end that doesn't lead back to the ratings pages. That

kind of dead end abounds on Photo.net and it has nothing to do with ANY of the criticisms

of my comments you made above. Good interface design is trusting your viewers enough

not to disable buttons on the site for no logical or productive reason.

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Do me a favor and keep your assumptions to yourself next time. I'm happy to elaborate on

my comments but your attempt to put words in my mouth doesn't move this conversation

forward.

[Mike D]

Photo.net is by far the easiest to read and most intuitive site of significant size on the internet in my opinion. It can be very hard to make things easy and many site and software designers fail in this respect, e.g. many Microsoft products. Also, in regard to spelling and grammatical errors, substance always trumps style. Period.

[chris hughes]

<i>Just because a web designer has a T1 line doesnt meant they should get sloppy and

create a bloaded site.</i>

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I don't understand why some people have a chip on their shoulders when it comes to

designers. I'm especially mystified by this when it comes to people who consider

themselves creative photographers and artists.

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As with the other poster, you've made a number of assumptions about my comments that

aren't even remotely true. You have an obvious bias against "Web designers" for some

reason since you seem to see them as people who like to load graphics onto a site, don't

check their work over different connection speeds and don't look at the pages they design

with a matrix of different browsers. As someone who has been a professional print and

Web designer for over a decade, I take MAJOR issue with those statements. It's insulting to

me and my profession for you to make those kind of suggestions when no one has

intimated that Photo.net needs more graphics, needs slower loading or less compatible

pages etc. etc. As I said in the post above, design isn't just loading a bunch of graphics

onto a page. Shame on any photographer here who thinks that. The statement is roughly

the same as saying that "Only photographs of nude women have any merit. All the rest of

it is just a bunch of pretentious garbage that only other socially inept photographers can

appreciate."

[hatley]

I think Chris that the folks who used this tone might have been responding a bit defensively to the "its a joke" tone of your first post, but I could be wrong.

 

It would be cool if we could stick with constructive stuff rather than debating the merits of the web design profession, what it means, and all that. *shrug* I'm sure I have better things to do than take the time to suggest things to move the ball forward and have it lost in a thread of bickering.

[karl_price]

"Photo.net's interface is flat, boring and difficult to use. It's not pleasant to look at in any way. The lack of a solid interface design is shocking for a site that's supposedly for creative people. The forum software is a joke, the system for ranking photos is a joke and the overall look and feel is a joke. " - Chris Hughes

 

Chris, you never gave any concrete suggestions for improvement. With the number of people who have come into this forum saying basically the same things about how bad the design is with no positive suggestions as to what could be improved, I'm not really surprised at the responses that were posted about site design ideas. It wasn't until a later post that you gave any sort of depth to what you thought could use improving.

 

The people here are intelligent and open to well reasoned criticism and suggestions. Share your ideas and take the challenge of proving their merit.

[kelly_flanigan1]

Chris re <i>As someone who has been a professional print and Web designer for over a decade, I take MAJOR issue with those statements. It's insulting to me and my profession for you to make those kind of suggestions when no one has intimated that Photo.net needs more graphics, needs slower loading or less compatible pages etc. etc</I><BR><BR>Here I have been programing since the 1960's, yes punch cards, drum memory, 24 and 36" disc drives with one head per track witha 5 megabyte capacity, run with a 3 phase 208 volt 1/2 HP motor and a belt drive.<BR><BR>The first leased lines at one of the 7 dwarfs I worked at for data transfer was 300bps, and was over 500 bucks per month, with a leased modem. You could not even buy a modem then, they were all leased with a yearly contract!<BR><BR>When I was using Photostyler before Photoshop 2.5; we were modeming digital files overseas with Kermet, X and Y modem at 1200 and 2400bps, dealing with overseas echos and noisy lines. It ws paramount not to have any bload, that added delay in getting images to an overseas production line that was down. <BR><BR>In that era, making trim and fit images was as fundamental as breathing, if one was doing a modem transfer to a BBS.<BR><BR><b>The trendof sloppyness in writing code, ill sizing images, and ill bloaded web sites IS real. </b><BR><BR>When gasoline is cheap, folks dont care as much about gas mileage. With increased speeds of dsl and cable, many web sites today ARE more bloaded. <BR><BR>You must have blinders on or be new to the internet game not to have noticed the increase in poor website layout.<BR><BR><BR><BR>After Katrina, the high speed dsl and cable at the summer home area died in alot of places for months. Then one farts around on lame FEMA sites on dialup, with a water soaked patched line that connects at 14.4 or 19.2k only, and you want to kick the hell out of the jackass who loaded up the flash crap, poor layout, ill sized images. Its real exciting to be running a generator with a limited supply of gas, and waiting for a web site to load, to file out claims forms, or get info. Some of us would feel better if we could place these designer chaps in the stocks, or have them go thru an emergency and have to deal with their own slow sloppy retarded site. <BR><BR><b> Folks long ago could'nt get away with this bload.</b><BR><BR> Over a decade ago our 128K ISDN line was 500 bucks per month, and most folks had a 9600bps modem. Websites COULD'nt be sloppy then, because few folks had faster hooks to the internet. I take a MAJOR issue with your lack of not seeing the increase in bload and un-professionalism by the minority of web designers today that ARE sloppy, lazy, and create boggy sites for dial up users.<BR><BR><b> I am not saying YOU make sites like this.</b><BR><BR> I AM saying that the trend is a greater percentage of slow boggy webs sites exist today than when web designers had more discipline long ago. Why defend sloppy unprofessionalism?

[lightwait]

It's hilarious: flame the design, then flame those who make assumptions based on your own lack of information.

 

Chris, you asked for all that, your post is . . . as you say, a joke.

[sprouty]

I tell you what, I'll explain the proper spelling of "bloated" if someone will explain what "chrome" (in the context of this discussion) is.

<P>

Not being a web designer I can't offer technical suggestions but I do have to wonder why I have such a hard time searching for something in the forums. You can type in an exact phrase, direct Google to the site, and still come up with page after page of links to useless crap or worse yet, no match at all.

<P>

And how about searching for an image you saw? No tags? Just a bunch of categories, (which coincidentally half my images don't fit into).

<P>

As for little oddities: why is it "My" Workspace to get to my home page but "Your" Community Member Page/Posting History to get to what everyone else sees?

<P>

And has anyone else noticed that on the Workspace page the most recent entries/comments are at the top of the list but at the Community page the Forum entries are listed in reverse order.

<P>

On the Workspace page the content for "Your Forum Posts" is different from the Community page "Forum Postings"

<P>

I could go on for a month I bet.

<P>

So you can say what you want about how much you like/dislike this site but you can't deny there are some strange things in the way you navigate through it

[frank_oddsocks]

From the Jargon File 4.4.7 (www.catb.org/jargon) (and identical in 3.0.0):

 

chrome - [from automotive slang via wargaming] Showy features added to attract users

but contributing little or nothing to the power of a system. ﾓThe 3D icons in Motif are just

chrome, but they certainly are pretty chrome!ﾔ Distinguished from "bells and whistles" by

the fact that the latter are usually added to gratify developers' own desires for

featurefulness. Often used as a term of contempt.

 

The Mozilla people apparently didn't grok the irony.

[sprouty]

"www.catb.org/jargon"

 

Wow, seems like I've got some reading to do now.